Zero Days Page 6
But as we moved north, we discovered that you can’t do the trail and still follow all the rules. In serious bear country, we were really careful about food storage, but there were rainy nights in Oregon when we slept with our food in the tent. As for campsites—there were places where we just couldn’t obey every last regulation. I particularly remember a long section of trail approaching Castle Crags State Park in northern California. The guidebook noted that camping was illegal for several miles before the park border, because the trail ran through private property. And it was also illegal to put up a tent once inside the state park, where camping was allowed only in established campgrounds, and the trail didn’t go through them. Thanks to water concerns and other logistics, there wasn’t a way we could avoid camping somewhere in that stretch. Imagine my complete lack of surprise when, just before the park border, we found a spot where people obviously camped quite often, sometimes in large numbers. We stayed there, too. We bent the rules as little as possible, but without some bending, it would have been very difficult to finish.
We also went from purists to pragmatists when it came to staying on the official Pacific Crest Trail. We all agreed on our definition of a thru-hike: Walk all the way from Mexico to Canada in one calendar year, with all sections linked together on foot. (For example, if we had to skip a section due to a forest fire, which often happens to PCT thru-hikers, we would have to go back and walk it after finishing the rest of the trail.) We also started out determined to stick with the trail as much as possible. During our town stop in Idyllwild, we engaged in a long discussion of whether we did wrong to take an alternate route, the Little Tahquitz Valley Trail, when we couldn’t stay on the official route because it was buried under snow and I kept falling down. My feeling was that the detour was perfectly OK. Bolstering my opinion was the fact that another hiker, Walks Alone, had to drop out because he broke his collarbone falling on the slippery official route. That could have easily happened to me. As we moved north, we kept it official as much as possible, but when the weather began to worsen, we took occasional alternate routes, especially if they were recommended in the guidebook. Taking an alternate route sometimes was safer, but not always. The closest we came to risking death was in September when we decided to walk around Russell and Milk creeks because of their reputation for danger during rainy weather, which—this being Oregon—we had seen a lot of. From Pamelia Lake, we hiked down to a highway, and the next day had to walk through a construction area that put us right smack in the path of high-speed traffic. I still shiver, thinking about those huge vehicles hurtling down on Mary as we rushed along the road.
PUNCTUALITY: When Mary was born, the reputation for punctuality that Gary and I had built up took a severe hit. As new parents, we had an excuse. But on the PCT, there was no excuse for our inability to get out of camp more quickly each morning. Three hours to break camp and get walking, without even cooking a hot breakfast? Good grief. The most humiliating day was the time we camped with a thru-hiker with the trail name of Pineneedle at Spanish Needle Creek two days before Kennedy Meadows, which marks the end of the southern California section of the trail. We had a 25-mile day ahead of us with significant altitude gain and loss, so we got up at 4:30 a.m. We did cook breakfast that morning, probably because we had more freeze-dried food left than any other kind. We really pushed hard and managed to get out of camp at 7:10. Meanwhile, Pineneedle woke up at 6:30 a.m. and left at 7. He just got up, packed up his tent and so on, put on his boots, and hit the trail. Amazing. We weren’t any better at sticking to our original schedule, which called for us to finish the PCT in early October. We lost a day or two in the first seven weeks through the desert, then lost another four days because it took us so long to complete our resupply work while we were at home after our June trip to Maryland. We took unplanned zero days at Vermilion Valley, Carson City, and again at Cascade Locks, Oregon, when I realized I would have to leave the trail temporarily for dental and medical treatment. We had to spend a day at the Portland REI buying a two-person tent for Gary and Mary to continue with, plus some cold-weather gear. We lost so many days that when we finally headed into a late-October snowstorm in hopes of completing the final stretch of Washington state, we were the last people on the trail.
SIMPLICITY: We’re not Luddites, honest. We decided, years ago, for perfectly logical reasons, against having a television set at home (and thus no VCR, no video games, and no video cameras). Same goes for cordless phones and cell phones. So it was ironic that when we headed out on the trail to spend time outside of civilization, we were lugging a video camera, a cell phone, and a new digital camera that we didn’t even figure out how to use properly until halfway through California. The digital camera replaced the film cameras we had used and abused over the years to the point of unreliability. The video camera was for shooting film for a documentary that died stillborn but that seemed like a good idea at the time. And the cell phone was for calling motels and arranging rides along the way. Many backpackers whose houses are loaded with the latest technological wizardry deliberately eschew all gadgets on the trail. Some don’t even carry a camera or a wristwatch. We felt as though we were the last people in the English-speaking world to acquire a cell phone, but once we had it, we were glad we had brought it along. It’s no good for emergencies—there’s hardly any cell phone coverage in the backcountry—but it was very useful for calling for a ride from the trailhead and for calling friends and relatives when motels lacked working telephones.
We didn’t carry a TV with us, of course, but we watched more television while we were thru-hikers than we ordinarily see in an entire year. At almost every town stop, we’d check into a motel. And before long, Gary and Mary would be glued to the screen. Channel surfing drives me into a homicidal rage, so I generally retreated to a corner of the room with the newspaper and tried to ignore the monster truck pulls, cooking programs, historical re-enactments, and ancient cartoons they were watching. I couldn’t help noticing that at one town stop in Oregon, Mary watched The Matrix, which struck me as not entirely suitable for a 10-year-old. But I decided to let Gary be the adult that night, as far as monitoring the TV went.
Living without television at home is a major plus for anyone who wants to have a family that’s seriously involved in outdoor adventure. That wasn’t why we got rid of ours before Mary was born (we did that because we feel television is the biggest time-waster ever invented), but it turned out to be a big help. Without spoon-fed electronic entertainment, children grow up learning how to create their own entertainment, indoors and out. They learn to be content with a lightweight paperback book for relaxation, and to focus on the real world long enough to watch a hummingbird visit a feeder or a deer climb a hill. In the wilderness, Mary likes to braid pine needles while walking, and in camp she depends on her imagination to create stories around the towns she builds with rocks, twigs, and pinecones. Kids who grow up with TV are attuned to fast-moving, all-engrossing entertainment, and it’s hard for them to make the transition to the slow-moving natural world. But for Mary, no TV and no VCR meant she grew up without knowing quite all the characters on the Cartoon Network, without memorizing all the lyrics to The Little Mermaid, and without playing video games. And thus, she didn’t miss them on the trail.
ENVIRONMENTALISM: I should have felt really good about this one. We followed Leave No Trace standards as much as possible, including packing out our toilet paper, which is more than most hikers do. And, of course, we weren’t burning any gasoline on the trail. But although we didn’t drive a car for most of the time, I made up for it during the last month, driving about 5,000 miles to get home, get back up to Washington, play trail angel all over the state—including side trips to Yakima and Seattle—and then finally go home again. In the end, I probably drove as many miles as if I’d never set foot on the PCT that year.
IN SPITE OF THE CHANGES we made to our family values on the trail, the one we did retain, without compromise, was togetherness. It may have been horrid, as Mary
suggested in her journal entry at the beginning of this chapter. Sometimes we were so much on the outs with each other, I thought we’d never be on speaking terms again. But we’ve always been a close family, and it was that willingness to stay close, no matter how badly we wanted to divorce and disown each other, that formed us into a group capable of taking on almost any challenge. The hardest thing for all of us was when we split up in September, when I had to return home briefly for medical treatment, and Gary and Mary had to continue without me. And the happiest day for me was when we teamed up again in Mazama, Washington, to take on the frozen barrier of the North Cascades. We were worried, we were stressed, we were in some degree of danger. But we were together again.
CHAPTER 3
BACKPACKERS A TO Z
Day 123: It was cold, windy, and foggy. We almost got lost around Grouse Hill. The high point was definitely meeting Scott Williamson. He told us a lot, like how people often got sick around Crater Lake, and the South Brown Mountain Shelter well water was highly suspect. He carried a little rubber ducky! Got to camp, dark and damp.
—from Scrambler’s journal
BACKPACKERS ARE MY KIND OF PEOPLE. When Gary, Mary, and I attended our first Annual Day Zero Pacific Crest Trail Kick Off (ADZPCTKO) at Lake Morena County Campground, I looked at the collection of long-haired hippie types, the talkative, gregarious types, and the shy, hopeful, and helpful types all exchanging tips on gear, sharing sunscreen, looking out for each other’s dogs and children, and volunteering in droves for kitchen duty, and felt right at home. To some extent, they reminded me of the people I got to know during my year as a member of the Lutheran Volunteer Corps, when I lived in Baltimore with five other volunteers and worked for an inner-city health clinic writing newsletters, raising money, and lobbying at the Statehouse. Members of both groups are, for the most part, young or young-at-heart, well-read, and college-educated or self-educated. Both groups include significant numbers of vegetarians, amateur musicians, and pacifists. They’re comfortable with eccentrics, uncomfortable with ideologues, and generally opposed to litterbugs, war, and the destruction of the environment. Most of all, they’re smart, healthy, and determined to achieve their goals.
Roughly 200 to 300 people make it their goal to thru-hike the 2,650 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail every year. There aren’t any official demographic numbers on PCT thru-hikers, but judging from our observations, young men with middleclass backgrounds and college educations make up a slight majority. It would be misleading to envision a “typical” PCT thru-hiker. More women are hiking than ever before, as well as more senior citizens and more people from other countries. We met people who worked in construction or waited tables for a living, along with a sprinkling of Ph.Ds.
Our encounters with backpackers run counter to the picture some news accounts try to draw of thru-hikers, painting them as tortured souls and social misfits. Even professional journalists, whose job it is to explain unusual people and events to their readers and to demolish stereotypes rather than reinforce them, seem to have trouble getting past their preconceptions. All too often, they portray thru-hikers as freaks or lonely losers, people trying (usually without success) to escape the past or find the future, to prove something, or to discover the meaning of life.
During our six months on the PCT, we met 45 or 50 people who were attempting a thru-hike, plus many more who were walking shorter sections. On the whole, these folks were so healthy and normal that I often forgot that they were attempting to do something extraordinary. Typically, these people were taking advantage of a natural pause in life to fit in some adventure. Many had just graduated from college, or were between college and graduate school. Others had been laid off or bought out, and hit the PCT before their next serious job searches. Many ordinary Americans do the same thing, although their “adventures” are more likely to involve a few months of sightseeing or maybe volunteer work. I’m not trying to suggest that thru-hikers are ordinary—they’re not. And while we often urged parents we met along the way to take their kids backpacking, we would never suggest they tackle something on the order of the PCT without working up to it. That would be like suggesting that anyone with an ordinary level of physical fitness and a spare $60,000 can safely climb Mt. Everest. But neither are backpackers very different from the mainstream.
One of the characteristics that does set thru-hikers apart from the mainstream is their use of nicknames during their time on the trail, and even afterward. For some backpackers, acquiring a trail name is a matter of great consequence. Others use them but don’t attach much importance to them. And some very serious and even famous thru-hikers never do acquire trail names. The trail name tradition is generally considered to have begun on the Appalachian Trail. But the custom of assuming, or assigning, nicknames related to an intense experience goes back much further. The military in particular seems to generate nicknames that are based on experiences only other members of the unit can appreciate.
Trail names also serve a practical purpose. They are an easy way for thru-hikers to establish an identity within the group. Since there are no professional guides on the long trails, and no one individual is responsible for looking out for us, we learn to watch out for each other. If someone named Jim or Karen doesn’t show up as expected at a trail angel’s house or at a road crossing, it’s going to be pretty hard to track down that particular Jim or Karen because they are such common names. But if word goes out that Sandpiper is overdue, or that Chocoholic left his camera and his passport at the Summit Inn, the trail community can focus on the right person and solve the mystery, sometimes with amazing speed.
A couple years after our PCT trek, I mentioned to Mary that a columnist in a southern California newspaper made fun of people who use trail names, suggesting it’s pretentious and immature. Mary thought seriously for a while, and then opined that while people’s “real” names are important, sometimes the trail names they choose, or which are chosen for them, become their “true” names. (Other times, of course, they’re meant to be a joke and are taken as such.)
WHEN WE BEGAN THE PCT, like all prospective thru-hikers, we looked forward to awesome scenery and unforgettable trail experiences. By the time we finished, like all successful thru-hikers, we realized that many of our best memories were of the people we met along the way, and of the relationships we formed with them. That’s why our fellow backpackers deserve a chapter of their own. That’s also why I’ve chosen to present real people, rather than the composite characters found in many books about outdoor adventures. And rather than pseudonyms, I’m sticking with people’s actual names—first, or first and last, whichever they tend to use—or their chosen trail names. Some were thru-hikers, others section hikers, and some were just out for a long weekend. They’re arranged alphabetically by the names they prefer or by the names for which they are best known in the thru-hiking community.
ALICE AND PAUL were heading north from Muir Pass on a cool, rainy July 3, when they spotted us taking a break among some junipers. They swung by to say hello and offer us their extra food. From then on, we saw them almost every day until they left the PCT eight days later at Tuolumne Meadows to complete their south-to-north journey on the John Muir Trail. (The 211-mile JMT coincides with the PCT along most of its length, but splits off at the north end to drop down to Yosemite Village, and at the south end to summit Mt. Whitney.) Each time we parted, we’d say a final goodbye—only to see them again the next day. One day, Gary, Mary, and I topped a pass south of Yosemite to discover someone had spelled out a message in rocks. As soon as I stopped tripping over the rocks and figured out what it said—HI SCRAMBLER—I knew who had left it.
Paul and Alice had met through a mutual interest in organic chemistry at the University of California-Irvine. After they married, they went to work for a big pharmaceutical company, only to be laid off after it merged with an even bigger company. Paul had thru-hiked the PCT several years earlier, but the John Muir Trail was Alice’s first major backpacking trip. An attract
ive couple in their early 30s, they were among the finest people we met, not to mention the smartest. They were excellent conversationalists and took a strong liking to Mary. A year after we met them, they moved to California from the Midwest, eventually settling in Berkeley, where Alice attended the University of California’s Boalt Hall School of Law, and Paul launched a career in forensics and criminology research.
BRIAN AND CARYL, whom we first met at the Kennedy Meadows campground in June, were long-distance bicyclists and strong hikers. Brian is only a few years younger than Gary and me, and Caryl is a few years younger than Brian, so they were among the older people on the trail. But they have the strong, youthful look of people who keep in top physical condition all the time. We ran into them again on Glen Pass and at Vermilion Valley Resort, and expected they would finish the PCT without difficulty. But on July 15, we met them again at Sonora Pass—and this time, Caryl was on crutches. They had taken an alternate route through Section I, in hopes of avoiding the notorious elevation losses and gains in Yosemite National Park’s high country. At their third crossing of Matterhorn Creek, Caryl tossed her boots onto the opposite bank while she crossed in her spare shoes. Unfortunately, one boot didn’t make it all the way across and began floating downstream. While scrambling after it, Caryl slipped and cracked her kneecap. They had to hike out several miles before the Mono County Volunteer Search and Rescue team met them and took them to a hospital. Several weeks after we saw them at Sonora Pass, the fracture had mostly healed and they resumed the trail, but by now it was mid-September. A month later, with a winter storm threatening, they called it quits at Castle Crags State Park, and made plans to resume their PCT journey from that point the following summer.